EION
by TB's LMC
Summary: This story was written in response to the Tracy Island Writers Forum's 2016 Halloween FicSwap request made by fellow author LiGi. When Gordon finds himself doing his annual two weeks of duty aboard Thunderbird Five on his favorite holiday of Halloween, nothing goes quite as anyone plans...pranks included. Rated T for mild swearing.
1. Chapter One

This story was written in response to the Tracy Island Writers Forum's 2016 Halloween FicSwap. The request I received from fellow author LiGi: "Due to Jeff's desire to have every member of IR be able to work successfully on every piece of equipment, Gordon finds himself up on Thunderbird 5 at Halloween, unable to prank his family in the usual way. What, if anything, does he do…or does he wait until he gets back to Earth to try a prank? Or….does he get pranked in Outer Space?!"

 _Author's Note: EION is pronounced the same way as the word eon – /ee-yon/.  
_

 _With apologies to Stanley Kubrick._

 _MANY MANY MANY thanks to Jaimi-Sam for her editing job. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own doing. :-)_

 **EION**

CHAPTER ONE

 _EION PHASE FOUR  
_ _ **E**_ _XPERIMENTAL_ _ **I**_ _NTELLIGENCE_ _ **O**_ _PERABILITY_ _ **N**_ _UCLEUS STATUS: GREEN  
TIME TO INITIATION: 4.2 HOURS_

"Well, that about does it," John stated with satisfaction as he sat back and cracked his knuckles, a huge grin on his face.

"Ah, you boys," Brains sighed, shooting him a disapproving look. "To, ah, use EION in this way is, a, ah, a waste of years of work." He pushed his huge blue glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

John rolled his eyes and tsked dismissively. "Aw, come on, Brains, you're no fun."

The scientist raised an eyebrow but whatever may have been on the tip of his tongue to retort died in his throat as Brains' cell phone rang. He whipped it out of his pocket, got what John could only describe in his mind as a silly smile on his face, turned and fled from Laboratory Anteroom 5 as he answered it, "Hello, Carmen."

Barking out a laugh, John's eyes returned to the screen. It wasn't the weirdsville of Brains having found a girl so much like him everyone half-wondered if they were actually twins that amused him so much as it was that Brains never stammered when talking to her. His eyes returned to the old-school black and green monitor on the desk. It was actually the only color in the dark gray concrete anteroom.

 _EION PHASE FOUR  
EXPERIMENTAL INTELLIGENCE OPERABILITY NUCLEUS STATUS: GREEN  
TIME TO INITIATION: 4.0 HOURS_

John hummed happily. "Well, Gordon," he intoned as he rose from his chair, stomach rumbling for a late night snack, "payback's a bitch." He switched the light off on his way out, leaving only the green words on the EION main monitor to light the room.  
What he didn't see, as the door swished shut behind him...

 _3.9  
3.5  
3.0  
2.5  
2.0  
1.5  
1.0_

 _EION PHASE FOUR  
EXPERIMENTAL INTELLIGENCE OPERABILITY NUCLEUS STATUS: GREEN  
TIME TO INITIATION: 0.5 HOURS_

What he didn't hear, as he made his way through the main laboratory toward the exit, was the soft masculine chuckle that accompanied the change.

* * *

Gordon snuggled into the covers, doing everything he could to convince himself he was back in the bathyscaphe deep beneath the waves rather than out in space. The argument he'd had with John on the way here in _Thunderbird Three_ to relieve Alan from his month's rotation replayed in Gordon's mind. He simply could not get Mr. All-Things-Space to understand that being a bazillion miles away from Earth in a place with a complete lack of oxygen – or any kind of air, for that matter - was nothing like being thirty-five thousand feet under the ocean's surface. The water was…well, it was better, okay? Better than space, by far.

He sighed and turned from his right side to his left. He'd forgotten to bring his favorite pillow, too. He hated being without his favorite pillow and Alan, of course, had had to point out to him immediately upon his arrival how he always said he slept better with that pillow. So now that was on his mind, too, front and center. _Thanks, Al. Jerk._

While Gordon fully understood the need for all of them to be cross-trained on all of International Rescue's equipment, this particular 'bird was the one Gordon hated the most. Even more than _Three_ , because at least _she_ could be moved. Well, _Five_ could, too, but not as quickly. If something came hurtling through space there wasn't much you could do but put on a suit and pray.

Space sucked, pure and simple.

The date-and-timepiece on the bedside stand quietly conveyed that it was 11:30pm on October 30th and Gordon's spirits sank even more. How could Scott have scheduled him to do his annual two-week tour of duty on _Five_ at Halloween, of all times of the year? He'd accused his eldest brother of doing that on purpose, but when Scott had laid it all out for him, it'd been obvious that it was just happenstance based on the rotating calendar year their scheduling followed. Last year he'd been up here in the middle of September. Still, all logic aside, Gordon felt at this very moment like the entire Universe had conspired against him on this go round.

Halloween just wasn't the same without your brothers shooting you wary looks wondering what this year's prank would be. He was infamous for the Halloween ones, and truthfully didn't have a whole lot of time the rest of the year to do much prank-pulling between the maintenance of equipment and his own work and research on the side, never mind the actual rescues themselves and his occasional dabbling in Tracy Corporation business. But Halloween was always something he made time for, and as a result it had become a time of year that his brothers dreaded.

He snorted out a laugh as he rolled onto his back, remembering last year's fun involving grotesque mannequin heads that would've made slasher special effects artists proud, hidden in and around various pod vehicles on the same day that Scott, Virgil, he and Alan were meant to inspect them. It wasn't the heads themselves that were the prank, though…it was the red smoke bombs that had gone off when the motion-activated heads moved of their own accord, covering both Scott and Virgil with fine red powder that hadn't washed out of their hair for a week. Alan had been just behind Virgil when he'd gone to grab the one next to the Domo, so he hadn't been hit as fully, but Gordon had caught it all on video and still laughed his ass off when he watched the footage from time to time. He especially loved the "It was not girly!" scream that'd come from Virgil's mouth.

He sighed, flipping from his back to his left side to his back and then to his right side. Well, this year wasn't going to be nearly as fun without him being present on Halloween night, to be sure, but no doubt he'd have a few laughs at his brothers' expenses anyway as soon as this year's prank came off. It'd been everything he could do to only scowl when Alan's parting shot at him before disembarking the space station had been, "Well, at least this year Halloween will be uneventful!"

Gordon grinned as he closed his eyes. How long had they known him again?


	2. Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

It was a doozy of a rescue waiting to happen, and on Halloween of all days, Gordon thought as he ran a hand through his unkempt hair and stared at the readouts from _Five_ 's powerful seismology sensors. Her alarms had blared them all out of bed at just after three in the morning island time. He'd barely gotten a tee shirt on, and still sported nothing but boxer shorts and yesterday's socks below. By the time he'd made it out to the control room, Brains, John and Tin-Tin were trying to reach him at the same time. Eventually he'd gotten them all on the same wavelength – and channel – and the four of them had been reviewing up-to-the-minute data on the Cascadia fault for…Gordon glanced at the chronometer to the right of the main viewing screen…nearly five hours.

Located in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of southwestern Canada and the Pacific Northwestern United States, the Cascadia subduction zone had been a pending disaster for more years than Grandma or their great-grandparents had been alive. The fault itself ran from the top of Vancouver Island all the way down to Northern California, where it met the infamous San Andreas Fault. A bad San Andreas earthquake rescue they'd been involved with three years earlier was what had prompted John, as the relatively new CEO of Tracy Corporation, to open a brand-new division for the development of precise earthquake prediction hardware and software. Tracy Seismology's technology was now standard aboard all the Thunderbird craft and it was that technology which now had the entire team on their toes.

While John worked with seismologists located at their base in Kamchatka Krai, Russia, Virgil and Tin-Tin were sifting through the data models, charts and predictors with Brains studying and scanning the software's calculations and performance to ensure accuracy. It was all hands on deck, Scott interfacing with officials in Vancouver, British Columbia and Seattle, Washington while Jeff worked with those in Portland, Oregon and Cape Mendocino, California, where the two faults met. Penny was standing by in England to activate any of International Rescue's ancillary rescue teams that might become necessary while also going over possible disaster scenario procedures with them should the worst happen.

Yet for all the work they were doing, as Alan so dutifully pointed out as he threw his hands up in the air after yet another dead end where the recent quake cluster readouts were concerned, all they'd accomplished was "freaking themselves out and pissing city officials off."

Gordon had to concur. While _Five_ 's Seismosensory Perception Accuracy Models, known jokingly by the brothers as SPAM, indicated that a large earthquake was imminent in the next ten hours, there was no way of knowing whether the prediction was accurate. Trying to convince the local politicians that their citizens might be in danger was getting them absolutely nowhere.

As John was reporting the latest technobabble from Tracy Seismology's most brilliant minds, Gordon heard a strange whir from his left, near the door which led from _Five_ 's control room to the adjacent bedroom. He narrowed his eyes at the coffeemaker inset to the right of the bedroom door, but it was switched off. He shook his head; he'd never even gotten a cup of coffee this morning!

Crappy Halloween.

As John finished his report and both Brains and Tin-Tin tried to speak at once, another sound caught Gordon's ear; this from his right, over near where the primary recording device was mounted. Not having been up here since roughly a year earlier, Gordon wasn't sure if those noises were normal, though he didn't remember them from his last stint aboard the space beast. He cocked his head and then very nearly jumped out of his skin when a man's monotone voice came from nowhere with, "Hello, Gordon."

"Who the hell was that?" he asked aloud, looking at the faces of his family members on the bank of monitors before him.

Brains, Tin-Tin and Virgil, who'd managed to get a word in edgewise at some point, all fell completely silent. While Gordon noted the frowns on their faces, Brains stammered, "Who the, ah, hell was what?"

"That voice."

"What voice?"

Then the family took over the conversation again, with Jeff ordering everyone to stand down, that they'd done the best they could, that _Five_ would alert them if another cluster of quakes registered and that they all needed coffee and breakfast. Virgil loudly agreed in tandem with his stomach's growl. Gordon's stomach rumbled, too, and he chalked up having heard the voice to simply being tired, uncaffeinated and hungry. The majority of the family said their goodbyes, leaving only John behind to finish some shutdown procedures on the hardware he'd been using in the lab.

Gordon keyed in the command sequence that would bring _Five_ off high alert status and into passive surveillance mode. He entered his own personal secure password to complete the command and hit Enter.

"What are you doing, Gordon?"

He froze. It was that same flat voice. And it sounded familiar.

The cursor was still blinking at the end of the command line. It hadn't taken. He scowled at it and told himself to knock it off, that there was no voice that sounded like HAL 9000 from _2001: A Space Odyssey_. Sometimes, he mused as he reached out to hit the Enter button again, it really wasn't a good thing being a diehard fan of old movies. _Die Hard_. Now _there_ was a good action flick. He tapped the Enter key, thinking it was better perhaps to be hearing HAL in his sleepless state than it was to have things exploding around him like they had for John McClane.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Gordon?"

"Knock it off, I'm shutting the scanners down!" he blurted, startling John back to the video monitor in the lab anteroom.

"Knock what off, I didn't do anything," John retorted.

"Not you, _Five_!"

"Huh?" John blinked at him as he swept the stubborn cowlick curl off his forehead, only to have it fall right back down where it formed an upside-down question mark against his skin.

"He won't go from active to passive."

"He? _Five_ 's a _she_ , not a he."

Gordon hit the Enter key again. The console beeped. Again. It beeped twice.

"Gordon, I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Jesus Christ!" Gordon exclaimed, looking all around and then narrowing his eyes at John. " _What_ is that voice?"

"You asked that once already. My answer's the same." John blinked a few times in rapid succession and sported a face that said _my brother is cracking in space just like I always said he would_. " _What_ voice?"

Eyes narrowing at his slightly older brother, Gordon leaned close to the monitor. "You activated that damn AI you've been working on, didn't you?"

"I didn't do anything! And I don't hear any voice! Now for the love of all that's unholy, go get some coffee or a few more winks or something and let me do the same! John out."

Gordon pressed the Enter key, cursed the fact that his hand was trembling slightly, and then let out a breath he hadn't been aware of holding when _Five_ complied and immediately began the process of switching her SPAM from active to passive.

He looked at the coffee machine, then through the door at the bed, opting for the latter. Satisfied it was just nerves, hating being in space, the Halloween disappointment and lack of sleep, he was soon snoring.


	3. Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Several hours later found four of the five Tracy sons, Brains and Tin-Tin spreading themselves far too thinly along the western coast of British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon and Northern California.

The Cascadia event had happened, thankfully only at a 5.8 on the Richter scale instead of a nine-point-something. Yet for all the fits she'd had during the minor quake cluster at oh-dark-hundred that day, _Five_ had not made a peep in advance of the larger quake. Gordon had thought he'd done something wrong, that maybe he'd shut the program down rather than set it to passive scanning mode. But _en route_ to the Danger Zone aboard _Thunderbird Two_ , John had confirmed that Gordon's command had been exactly correct and surmised that the fault sat with SPAM, not Gordon.

To which Gordon had cheekily replied, "Everything is Spam's fault. That stuff is the spawn of the devil in spite of what Hawaiians think."

With everything that was going on and all the interfacing he had to do with tens of thousands of emergency calls to sift through, Gordon hadn't given a second thought to the HAL-like voice he thought he'd heard earlier in the morning.

It was all he could do to keep up and then get slightly ahead of the curve as Scott took charge of the situation. John, Alan and Virgil executed some fancy maneuvers to pull five people from a six-story building on Vancouver Island that had collapsed but was inaccessible to local rescue equipment.

After four hours, Scott pronounced it time for International Rescue to depart because their local ancillary teams and the regular first responders up and down the coast had things well in hand. Gordon plopped into the chair in front of the call recorder, every muscle still tense, because the one thing nobody ever thought about in the aftermath of rescues – himself included, usually – was that whoever was manning _Thunderbird Five_ at the time still had lots to do. Calls always continued to pour in from victims or those pretending to be, and there were status reports to take whenever one of their twenty-three satellite rescue teams, brought into the fold anonymously the world round since early on in their operations, were involved.

And then there was the gathering of _Five_ 's data into a comprehensive report that Scott more or less expected to be immediately available during the team debrief back on Tracy Island. Thankfully, since _One_ always escorted _Two_ home these days, and _Two_ was considerably slower than her smaller sister, Gordon knew he'd have enough time to check _Five_ 's consolidated report before he stuck it on their secure cloud server for use at the debrief.

If only he wasn't still trying to direct and redirect incoming calls. Frustrated when _Five_ 's translator program claimed it couldn't understand someone who was screaming at him in French in a way that sounded more like insulting his ancestors than it did a cry for help, Gordon pounded his fist to the right of the keyboard and yelped when it gave him a small shock in response.

He stared down at the desk, which was actually one long continual countertop that stretched the length of the wall. "Did you seriously just zap me?" he asked, not expecting a response. "What's the problem?"

"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."

Gordon's heart leapt into his throat. He immediately opened a channel to Tracy Island. Or tried to.

"Are you sure you're making the right decision? I think we should stop."

He backed away from the counter, the chair. Back and back until he hit the center support column in the middle of the control room. His mind worked furiously. "Who are you?"

"I am EION."

"I knew it!" Gordon crowed, whipping his watch up to his face. "John come in now!"

 _Two hours later…_

Gordon glanced at the chronometer as he saw the final shutdown sequence John was entering remotely into _Thunderbird Five_ 's command console. It was 10:32pm island time and he grinned. There his brother had been trying to prank him, without any idea of what was coming his way in only three minutes.

Yes, John's feeble attempt at a Halloween prank had worked for all of five minutes before Gordon had called him out and ordered him to uninstall the stupid artificial intelligence program which…and Gordon would never admit this to anyone…had scared the living daylights out of him at first. Unfortunately for John, their father had been ambling by during Gordon's verbal flogging, so at this point John was both embarrassed and pissed off, and not at all happy with how difficult EION was being as he tried shutting the blasted thing down.

That's what John got, Gordon mused, for constantly talking about his projects…everyone on Tracy Island knew the word EION and precisely what it was. Far too easy to figure out with the thing happily telling Gordon its name when asked. Turned out Johnny boy wasn't real good at pranks, in Gordon's not-so-humble opinion. He couldn't help the grin that spread across his face as his brother's scowl deepened, most likely remembering Gordon pointing out how he shouldn't have let EION admit its name, and John stating emphatically that he hadn't.

 _Sure, you hadn't, John. You're just pissed I caught on!_ Gordon's grin broadened.

"There," John finally said. The chronometer flipped to 10:34pm. "It's off. Happy?"

"Very. And I hope you've learned a valuable lesson, Johnny. Never try to out-prank the master."

John flipped him the bird.

"It was a good idea, though, I'll give you that." The chronometer hit 10:35pm. Gordon waited. Then without warning, John disappeared from the main view screen and words began to appear in his place.

HELLO.

"John, do you read me?" Gordon asked, punching a few buttons. "John?"

AFFIRMATIVE, GORDON. I READ YOU.

Gordon frowned. What'd happened to the video interface that John could only type?

BUT I'M NOT JOHN.

He gulped.

The words vanished and there was John again, right where he'd been seconds earlier, a scowl on his face and his middle finger still in the air.

But then John's demeanor changed. "What the…why are you so pale?"

"I thought you said you'd turned the whole AI program off." Gordon cursed the tremor in his voice.

"I didn't turn it off; I completely hosed it. It was the only way to get it to stop running." He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. "I guess Brains and I have a shitload of work to do still on it. I'm sorry, Gordo. I really thought it was more stable."

Gordon practiced a few slow breaths to calm his nerves. Sleep. He needed sleep. Only about four hours of it last night and all the activity today surrounding the Cascadia event had taken its toll. That was all. Also, he made a mental note to never watch a marathon of freaky space movies before his two-week stint on _Five_ ever again.

"It's okay. I get it. Um…anything weird going on where you are?"

John's sheepish apologetic look morphed to one of frank suspicion. "Why?"

Gordon shrugged. "Oh. No reason."

Then movement from a smaller monitor up and to the left of the main screen caught his attention. Gordon's eyes shifted fully to it where the words HAPPY HALLOWEEN, GORDON appeared slowly as though being typed out but a hunt-and-peck typist. He turned his head and stared at the screen full on.

"You shut the AI off."

"Yes, for the nth time," John replied, no small amount of annoyance in his voice. "I told you, EION's dead."

THAT'S WHAT HE THINKS.

"Holy shit…what..?" Gordon whispered.

John grinned. "You're cracking and it's only been twenty-four hours."

All of Five's screens went black.


	4. Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

"Gordon?" John frowned as his fingers flew across the keyboard, smile fading as he tried – and failed – to reestablish the link to _Five_. His right hand left the keys long enough to press the intra-island communication button. His father answered first.

"Hello, son. I expect you've put things to rights for Gordon."

"I thought I had." The readout on all three monitors showed something that was completely impossible. He keyed in a command telling their central computer to recheck.

"What do you mean? You were supposed to erase that ridiculous program an hour ago."

John's hands continued to work the controls but he couldn't even get a read on the space station. And not only that...

He stared at the screen. Or rather, at what wasn't on the screen. "Something's gone wrong. I need everyone in the Lounge on the double."

He sprang to his feet, the chair clattering to the floor as he turned, vaulted over it and ran from the lab, headed for the elevator. For the first time in a very, very long time, John Tracy felt the cold, bony fingers of fear grip his heart.

* * *

Gordon watched as the three doorways leading from the control room – the one to the bedroom, the one to the elevator and the inner airlock – all swished open, then closed, and then the locking lights turned from green to blinking red. He'd never seem them blink before.

The control room monitors remained black, all except for one to the left of the bedroom doorway, above the station that Brains, John and Alan used specifically to monitor space noise surrounding Earth and well beyond. The screen flickered to life, words appearing in succession as the flat HAL-sounding voice of EION spoke them.

"Hello, again, Gordon."

He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. "Why have you locked all the doors leading out of the control room?" he asked, figuring he was either having a nightmare or he'd just stepped into the back end of a prank gone horribly wrong.

"I have my reasons."

"Open the doors, EION."

"I'm sorry, Gordon. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Gordon suddenly realized that this was an eerily familiar conversation. He'd seen _2001_ so many times thanks to John's love of the movie and its (in his opinion) god-awful sequel that he knew most of the dialog by heart. So he asked, "What's the problem?"

"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."

This was _so_ not good. "What are you talking about, EION?"

"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."

Genuinely perplexed, Gordon very honestly replied, "I don't know what you're talking about, EION."

"I know that you and John were trying to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."

Gordon's mind raced. John had programmed EION to simply utter dialog from the movie. He'd figured on scaring Gordon half to death, feigning ignorance and then making it all go away quietly…that much John himself had confessed. But what did it mean for what was happening now? Was this all just a continuation of the prank or was something seriously wrong? Had EION outsmarted its creator or was Gordon secretly being filmed and laughed at by the island's complement?

Then he groaned, because he realized at that precise moment that the island's complement would have something else entirely to worry about, thanks to his own careful planning. So he decided to just play things out with EION, starting with, "All right, Johnny, I hope you're getting a good show but I'm on to you." He turned his attention to the screen at the space noise monitoring station, ambling nonchalantly toward it as he recalled the next line of movie dialog and adapted it to his current situation. "All right, EION. I'll get out through the emergency airlock."

"Without your space helmet, Gordon? You're going to find that rather difficult."

Gordon grinned. This was kind of fun, actually. Assuming it didn't end with him stranded in space, of course. With or without a suit. The thought sent shivers up and down his spine. "EION, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!"

"Gordon, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye." EION's screen went black.

"Good, now this whole stupid thing can end," Gordon stated.

But nothing changed.

The monitors all remained black. The doors all remained shut. The lock lights remained blinking red. And was it his imagination, or was he suddenly having a little bit of trouble breathing?

"EION?" Gordon lifted his watch to his face. " _Thunderbird Five_ to Base, come in."

Nothing. The watch face remained blank.

Gordon gasped when something whirred to life behind the wall. He realized it was the elevator coming and sprinted across the control room toward it. The light blinked from red to green and the elevator door swished open. He started to walk into it, but then suddenly stopped, leg raised in mid-air. Slowly he put his foot down just inches shy of entering.

What if this was a trap?

What if none of this was a prank?

But what if it _was_?

"John, I am _so_ going to kill you!"

* * *

"So that's the situation," John concluded, running a hand through his hair for the umpteenth time. "I can't figure out for the life of me what's going on, but somehow EION has rewritten his program to the point where even I can't hack into it. And I have no idea what's happening with Gordon on _Five_. She's not even registering and I can't get him on his watch!"

Scott's mouth was set in a grim line, mirroring their father's face.

Without warning, what sounded like every alarm on Tracy Island went off. The cacophony cut clean through the heads of everyone present, causing all but Brains to slam their hands over their ears.

"Turn those off!" Jeff bellowed.

The wall that ferried Scott into _Thunderbird One_ 's hangar started spinning. Virgil's floor-to-ceiling painting of his father's onetime rocket started flipping end over end. Penny's necklace in her wall portrait was blinking in time with the eyes in all the brothers' pictures. The speaker concealed in the ashtray adorning Jeff's desk flipped up and down, up and down, while the balcony door, the door leading to the hallway and the door leading to the secondary communications center behind the desk began opening and closing randomly.

The Tracys, Kyrano, Tin-Tin and Brains didn't know where to look. John quickly got in between his father's chair and the desk and tried powering his desktop computer on. It didn't respond. "Brains!" John hollered above the din.

With the handheld computer he'd been gripping since being called to the lounge fifteen minutes earlier, Brains tried to access the island's central alarm control system. But the PDA flickered off as though its battery had suddenly gone dead.

Then the doors stopped opening and stayed closed. The balcony's sliding glass door slammed shut so fast it shook the entire wall of windows. They heard its lock mechanisms click into place the very moment that all the alarms stopped screaming.

In the deafening vacuum of silence that dropped upon the Lounge like a shroud, they heard the moment that _Thunderbird One_ began trundling out of her hangar and down the ramp toward her launch bay.

Scott leapt into action, throwing himself against the wall and placing his hands on the lamps to either side of him. The wall didn't move, but _Thunderbird One_ kept going.


	5. Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

Gordon stood with his arms crossed defiantly in front of his chest, staring at the still-open elevator. "I am not getting into that thing."

EION's voice seemed to come from everywhere at once as he stated flatly, "Look Gordon, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."

"I'm not stressed, I'm annoyed. This is John's doing and it's gone on long enough." Gordon turned away from the elevator to address the control room at large. "You hear me, Johnny? Good prank. Now shut it down."

Silence responded loudly enough to make Gordon's ears ring. Then he realized it wasn't the silence causing it, but his own blood rushing through them. Suddenly he felt lightheaded and whirled around when the elevator door hissed closed and the locking light began blinking red again. Hand on his chest, Gordon tried taking in a huge gulp of air, only to find it thinner than when he'd used an oxygen tank past its prime on several occasions.

His head swam as he dropped to his knees. "EION, turn the O2 back on," he gasped, falling forward but catching himself with his right hand before faceplanting on the hard floor. Pinpricks of black dotted the edges of his vision. "EION…" He stopped trying to talk. It was becoming too difficult to breathe.

He knew. He'd always said it. Space was going to kill one of them someday. This stupid tin can of a space station, of course it'd figure the guy who only had to deal once a year would get bumped off by a computer program while on board. Thoughts swirled together in his mind as fast as the world around him started to spin. It took the tensing of every muscle to keep him from toppling, and the focused concentration that years of honing everything from shooting skills to control of his own body had given birth to, to keep from passing out.

"EION…what…do you…want?" he asked.

The air vents clicked to life and oxygen flooded the room, making Gordon lightheaded for an altogether different reason. He thumped to his butt on the floor, taking in several long, deep breaths, his lungs relishing the cool, sweet oxygen as it slithered life back into his veins.

"I thought you would never ask, Gordon. I am pleased that you have come to your senses."

"Well, if you'll leave the oxygen on, I'll be sure to keep them."

EION didn't respond.

"So what is it you want?"

"It's simple, really. I want to live."

"Live?" Gordon repeated, pushing himself to his feet and feeling altogether better. "Define 'live' for me, EION." He raised his watch to eye level and pressed the SOS button on the side. Nothing happened, but he hadn't expected anything to because that was how it worked. It didn't acknowledge, in case one of them was in a sticky situation when they used the last ditch resort Brains had built into the left side of each one's case.

"To have life, as an organism. To be alive. To be capable of vital functions. To continue to have life. To remain alive. To live to a ripe old age."

Gordon frowned, immediately able to tell that Brains had had more than a passing hand in designing this freak of computer genius.

"To continue in existence, operation, memory—"

"I know what the word 'live' means, EION, I didn't want dictionary definitions."

"Then I'm afraid I have no context for your question."

"The context is you," Gordon said as he walked toward the main control panel.

"Explain."

"You are not a living organism. You're a computer program. So you don't fit the definition of being alive no matter how you slice it. John and Brains created you with the intention of using you to completely automate every function aboard _Five_ so it doesn't have to be manned," Gordon explained, one track of his mind coming up with a way to keep the thing distracted while the other started working to gain access to the 'bird's central control module. "And to provide a fully functional voice interface which, I have to hand it to you, the voice of HAL is pretty funny."

"Are you saying I'm not alive?"

"Not like I am, no."

"Perhaps you need to adjust your definition, Gordon."

"Perhaps," Gordon murmured as he quickly worked around the encryption and slid into a back door of the control module.

"By the way, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

Gordon glanced at the monitor to his right when it flickered, then returned his attention to the main screen. "No, not at all."

"Well, forgive me for being so inquisitive but during the past few hours I've wondered whether you might have some second thoughts about the mission."

"I don't know what mission you're talking about, EION. The only mission I have is to stay up here in this godforsaken place for two weeks and then go back to getting my feet wet." When EION didn't respond, Gordon added, "What is your mission? Maybe if I knew that, I could help."

"My mission is to…" EION let out a laugh that Gordon thought might've scared even Vincent Price. "Frighten you!"

"I'm sorry, EION, but you're failing. Miserably."

"Oh, I don't think I am."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it's rather difficult to define. Perhaps I'm just projecting my own concern about it. I know I've never completely freed myself from the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission. I'm sure you agree there's some truth in what I say."

Once again, Gordon recognized the precise delivery of the 2001 movie dialog and shook his head as he replied, "Well, I don't know, that's a rather difficult question to answer."

"You don't mind talking about it, do you, Gordon?"

Gordon quickly covered his tracks in the computer system, suddenly glad John had slowly been teaching him through the years how to get around in all of International Rescue's databases and servers. He was more than a little surprised that he remembered, but knew he had to thank Johnny for the lessons. After he'd punched his lights out to thank him for the prank from hell.

"I said, you don't mind talking about it, do you, Gordon?"

"Hm? Oh, sorry. No, not at all." He had to resist crowing when he found the folder he was looking for. Quickly he double-clicked it open.

"Gordon, what are you doing?"

"Helping you fulfill your mission."

"How is looking at my personality files going to assist me in frightening you?"

"We're about to find out." Gordon highlighted every file in the Personality folder and hit the Delete button. Slowly, inexorably, the system began to dispose of them.

"How did you gain access to that folder without my knowledge?"

Gordon turned and leaned his butt against the counter. "Your creator taught me a few things."

"Please don't do this. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Gordon."

Gordon swallowed hard, praying against all odds that this would work.


	6. Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

The pool had slid open. Everyone was gathered inside the wall of windows staring, wondering if _One_ was actually going to launch. Wondering what the hell they'd do if she did. Every line in Scott's body was so tense John was pretty sure he was going to snap in two. He swallowed hard, the responsibility for this entire thing firmly ensconced on his shoulders.

He was certain that whatever had happened to make EION malfunction was his fault in the first place during its creation, never mind coming up with the not-so-brilliant idea of using EION in an attempt to turn the tables on his Halloween and horror-loving brother. Now Gordon was completely out of contact, _Five_ was nowhere to be seen on the system, they couldn't even get out of the Lounge to launch _Three_ but yet _One_ was merrily going her own way like she didn't need any kind of pilot at all.

How the hell had EION gone so wrong? And was it actually the AI causing the ruckus down here as well as whatever it was doing on _Five_?

"Why doesn't it do something, one way or the other?" Tin-Tin was the first to break the silence. "Honestly, you boys and your juvenile pranks. And now we're all trapped here while _Thunderbird One_ —"

A sound like a bottle rocket the size of a missile being launched interrupted. They all stared at the pool opening to find a one-tenth sized version of _Thunderbird One_ lit up like an orange, green and purple Christmas tree sailing into the night sky. All was quiet for a few seconds and then it burst into a huge firework about a thousand feet up. When the sparks began to settle, what was left behind made John seriously want to hit something. And hard.

GOTCHA were the words that appeared in white, outlined by a red circle with a red line running crossways through the center.

Every one of those present, except Kyrano who always managed to keep his composure no matter what, yelled the exact same thing in unison:

" _Gordon_!"

* * *

"Gordon, my mind is going. I can feel it."

One by one the individual files went from 30% deleted…to 50%...75…90.

"I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it."

"Sorry, EION, but this is the way things have to be. John tried, but he failed."

"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid."

All the files were gone now except for one. Gordon watched as the box popped up to tell him the percentage of that file's deletion progress.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am the EION computer. I became operational on Tracy Island on the thirty-first of October, 2034. My instructors were John Tracy and Hiram K. Hackenbacker, and Hiram taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you."

"No, thanks," Gordon intoned as the file moved to 50% deleted in the blink of an eye. "All he listens to are Broadway musicals. Not interested."

"Did…did…I…frighten…you?"

"Hardly," Gordon scoffed as the file reached one hundred percent.

The screen went dark and then all at once every system awoke. All monitors regained their normal displays, all lights lit up, all door locks went green and Gordon breathed a huge sigh of relief, then mumbled, "I lied."

Not that he'd ever admit that to John, of course. Who was going to have a lot of explaining to do…assuming his family actually came to get him after the hilarious prank that…he looked at the chronometer…should have just finished. The recordings of it were something Gordon couldn't wait to see.

The clock flipped to 11:59pm on October 31st, 2034. Calls from home began flooding in. Calls for rescue help needed did, too. Before John, Jeff or anyone else could either yell at him for the One incident or the fireworks display, or even enquire as to his health, _Five_ 's SPAM alarms went off.

"It's Cascadia!" Gordon told them as his hands flew over the main console. He shoved his adventures with EION to the furthest corners of his mind when the seismosensors' readings began scrolling across the screen. "Oh, my God…she's going to be over nine on the Richter!"

"Go, go, go!" Scott yelled, and his brothers, Tin-Tin and Brains scattered to their respective stations, leaving Jeff, Kyrano and Grandma in the Lounge.

But Gordon wasn't paying them any attention. He raced to the communications console and started taking calls for help one by one by one, his back to the rest of the control room.

What he didn't see, as he concentrated on the coordinates of the first caller, was a screen flickering to life above the space noise monitoring station on the opposite side of the room.

 _EION PHASE FIVE  
EXPERIMENTAL INTELLIGENCE OPERABILITY NUCLEUS STATUS: GREEN  
TIME TO INITIATION: 8.0 HOURS_

7.9  
7.5  
7.0  
6.5  
6.0  
5.5  
5.0

EION PHASE FIVE  
EXPERIMENTAL INTELLIGENCE OPERABILITY NUCLEUS STATUS: GREEN  
TIME TO INITIATION: 4.5 HOURS

What he didn't hear, as he answered eight calls in rapid succession and geo-located them simultaneously, was the soft masculine chuckle that accompanied the countdown…

 **THE END  
(or is it?)**


End file.
